SPACE TOURISM: WHILE RYANAIR considers fat taxes and toilet charges, Virgin Galactic has already banked $40 million (€30 million) in deposits from would-be space tourists.
This week Virgin announced that the real money could be made in making the flight to Australia from Ireland as short as a flight to Spain.
Long-haul trips could be made in spaceships instead of planes in 20 years' time, Will Whitehorn, president of Virgin Galactic, told Reuters.
He said that Virgin's plans to take tourists into space are just a first stage that could open up a range of possibilities for the company, including space science, computer-server farms in space and replacing long-haul flights.
Whitehorn sees the possibility of transporting passengers to terrestrial destinations in spacecraft outside the atmosphere instead of by plane. He says a journey from Britain to Australia could be done in about 2.5 hours.
Advance bookings from 300 people (such as Stephen Hawking and Niki Lauda) willing to pay $200,000 (€150,000) each for a space flight convinced Virgin the venture was viable, he said. It is currently running test flights and hopes to soon win a licence from the Federal Aviation Authority and have these millionaires in space within two years.
Virgin claims that its technology, which releases a spaceship into sub-orbit in the air using a jet-carrier aircraft, is more environmentally friendly than traditional ground-launched rocket technology.